Trying Things, Keeping What Works

September was a month of adjusting. I went from being busy basically zero days a week to being busy five: three days of part-time work, plus choir and church.

A pretty dramatic change, and physically, it eventually became too much. Most of my “days off” still had somewhere I needed to be, which meant there wasn’t much actual recovery happening. By the end of the month, I could feel the accumulated exhaustion.

But there was another side to it: While I was doing all of this, I felt good. I felt active. Competent. Strong in my body in a way I haven’t in quite a while. So I’m trying to chase that part...just maybe a little more carefully.

September also gave me a new concept to chew on through SIPS: what I’ve started calling the coping phase.

Sometimes chronic illness isn’t crisis, but it isn’t recovery, either. You can be functioning. You can be doing things. But you can also not be getting enough space to actually heal. You’re just…coping.

That strange middle state has been really interesting to notice, and I’ll talk more about it in my Month 3 SIPS report.

The retail experiment

Part of September’s suddenly-full schedule was a month-long experiment working part time at a local consignment shop. And I’m glad I did it.

I had fun, learned a lot, and got to know some great people. Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the right fit for where my body and schedule are right now, so we parted ways. I will, however, absolutely continue to be one of their most loyal customers (who cuts up their clothes to make new ones. Shh.).

Working at thrift shops has always meant a lot to me. It was my first-ever job when I was 15 and I fell in love with secondhand clothes, never to look back. Coming back to consignment this time reminded me how much I enjoy that tiny ecosystem: what comes in, what sells, how things get priced, and why one piece will suddenly catch someone’s eye.

Apparently, I enjoyed that part enough that I came home and started my own Poshmark shop. I’m calling it Well Kept, Wildly Worn and it (hopefully) launches this month.

Mostly, I’m playing. I’ve been testing merchandise, watching offers, analyzing discounts, experimenting with themed sales and generally applying all the little things I learned from spending a month inside a consignment business.

It turns out I really enjoy the research side of resale — possibly more than any reasonable person should. And it’s dovetailed nicely with another thing that has been coming back lately: creativity.

Apparently, I dye clothes now

I’ve altered and reworked clothes since I was little, but a couple of years ago I became obsessed with a very expensive silk dress for one specific reason.

The color.

It was this multidimensional blue-green-black with a purple sheen, and I became completely determined to figure out how to make it myself.

I bought dye. I researched formulas. I compared hex codes. I zoomed into photos and examined individual pixel colors like a perfectly normal person.

Eventually, I got surprisingly close. And apparently, that was all the encouragement I needed.

Since then, I’ve been experimenting. A few table napkins here and there, testing dyes on fabrics and yarns, and a slowly accumulating rainbow in my wardrobe.

My current project is a peach dress I’m hand-dyeing into an ombré duster. It was a previous dye project that I'm still not excited by, so I'm taking it a step further and giving it a gothic makeover!

I'm not the world's best sewer so I’m mostly sticking to things like changing buttons, cutting/ripping, and fixing seams. But combining those small alterations with dye opens up a ridiculous number of possibilities.

Color has always fascinated me. I’m forever falling in love with something because it exists in one very specific shade.

Being able to create that color myself feels a little magical.

And finally: Autumn CSE Girl

You may also have noticed that some of the images appearing around The Chronic Worker and CSE lately look suspiciously like me.

That’s because they are. Sort of.

I’ve been experimenting with creating a small stock-photo library of disabled people at work and at home, using myself as the model and AI as a kind of camera assistant.

There is still remarkably little good stock photography showing disabled people simply living — working, resting, creating, sitting on the couch, making tea, having ordinary lives — without disability itself having to be the entire subject of the image. Or being the token disabled worker laughing with colleagues (cough gag me cough)

Other disabled creators and organizations have responded to that gap by making their own imagery, so I'm trying it, too. Big shoutout to *Affect's Disabled and Here collection, which is my main inspiration and primary source for excellent

*Pronounced "effect"

Autumn CSE Girl is the illustrated side of that same little visual world: seasonal, cozy, working-ish, usually carrying tea and increasingly developing a wardrobe of her own.

Which feels like a pretty appropriate place to end September.

A lot changed. Not all of it stuck.

But I’m moving more, making things again, experimenting with work, playing with clothes and colors, and starting to feel a little more like myself.

I’ll take it.

What are you trying right now — and what are you finding is actually worth keeping? I’d love to hear what you’re experimenting with this fall, especially the things that surprised you.

Join the conversation in the LinkedIn edition of Chronically Self-Employed.

One more thing: I’m still experimenting with my mini stock-photo library. Editors, art directors, disabled creators — what ordinary disabled-life or disabled-at-work images are you constantly searching for and never finding? I’d genuinely love to know.

This edition of Chronically Self-Employed was first published on LinkedIn. The Chronic Worker edition lives here as part of the complete CSE archive.

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